


Back to Front

by lalalabutterfly



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Angst, Bullying, Childhood Memories, Childhood Trauma, FML, First Meetings, Fluff and Angst, How Do I Tag, I Don't Even Know, I Made Myself Cry, Love, M/M, Meet-Cute, Minor Character Death, Minor Violence, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Rating May Change, Slow Burn, Tags May Change, The cat is my favourite character TBH, Trauma, You Have Been Warned, extremely slow, like damn, like super minor, minimal smut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-16
Updated: 2018-03-16
Packaged: 2019-04-01 00:39:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13986729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalalabutterfly/pseuds/lalalabutterfly
Summary: Louis is a damaged and depressed mess. Harry is a tall, clumsy mess with an affinity for helping others through their own damage.When a mystery plate of cookies appears outside Louis' door after a particularly bad night, the absolute last thing he expects is to end up falling for the man who left them there: his new, annoyingly happy and incredibly infuriating next-door neighbour.





	Back to Front

**Author's Note:**

> A meet-cute short story which turned into a really long monstrosity of a slow burn fic.  
> It's also my first official fic on here, although I'm a published writer I've been writing other stories for a while now, so be nice, please! 
> 
> This started as a short story (not fanfiction) written based on a prompt from Tumblr about one person baking the other cookies when they're depressed, and the other one eating all the cookies all the time. Once I finished writing it I realized that I had written about two characters who were essentially Louis and Harry, except at the time it was a m/f couple. I decided to re-jig and expand it, and this is the result! The first chapter is the original story, the rest the expanded version!  
> Unfortunately, I don't remember where I got the original prompt from, so if anyone has any idea just let me know and I'll add a credit or something. I'll also be adding different tags as I go, and as things are added.
> 
> This is purely for fun, and the characters only resemble the musicians/family members they're named for in name and physical appearance. I don't know them personally, and I am just borrowing their appearance/name for this story, plus I made a few of them into assholes and I know their real-life counterparts aren't that way. For the purposes of this story, Louis has one younger sister, and Harry's family is the same as irl. 
> 
> Don't forget to leave a comment! I'd love to talk about it.
> 
> xx  
> A
> 
> PS- I'm posting the original short story as the first chapter ("Preview") and then the full length expanded version after that, with a part probably every few weeks.

  **Preview**

 

The last time Louis saw his older sister, she was climbing out their second-story bedroom window in the middle of the night to go to a party with her boyfriend. Hannah had  gone to the party, gotten drunk and high at the same time and wandered off into the woods behind the house. She was found in a ditch by a dog walker after three days, an astonishing two kilometers away from the house. At eleven, Louis had been too young to be involved much in the whole process at the time, but it still permanently altered his worldview and the way he viewed his own life.

It taught him that a parent’s love is finite, and once it had all been poured into and used up with the loss and death of their eldest child, there was inevitably none left for the other children. It taught him that life is ultimately pointless and regardless of what you do and how well you manage to hold yourself together through difficult and traumatic things you will ultimately still come to the same fate as everyone else in this world, and that nothing you have done will ever matter. It taught him how to hold his own emotions in and how to appear more calm and collected than any regular person should be able to. It taught him to never get close to anyone as they will most likely leave you one way or another in the end. Finally, it taught him that much like everything else in the world, life is limited, that there is a definite beginning and end to absolutely everything including his own existence, and that’s when Louis started living his life by lasts.

The last time Louis played loud heavy metal music out of spite, he was on the phone with his mother and it was the thirteenth anniversary of his sister’s disappearance. He stumbled upon his genius plan by accident one year at college when he answered the phone on his birthday, stoned out of his mind with his then-boyfriend’s Megadeth album blasting in the background. Since then, he had whittled the experience down to an art form and was almost at the point where he looked forward to their twice a year phone calls. This year, like most, initial preparations began at 8:30 with his mother posting a vague, slightly passive aggressive facebook post about spending the anniversary of the death of her eldest child alone, and tagging Louis and his younger sister in the comments as if no-one could see, prompting him to ready his specially named “Love Songs” playlist, push the pizza boxes off of and sit in his mouldy old armchair with the stereo remote and his phone, and light up a cigarette to pass the time as well as create a cloud of smoke for effect. Plus, the fact that he swore that his mother could smell the smoke through the phone was always an added bonus, whether or not it was true.

Plans moved along at 9:00 when his phone rang and Louis waited to pick up until the absolute last second, starting the playlist, cranking up the volume, and answering with a somehow simultaneously sarcastic and exhausted exclamation. The call usually went for another half hour or so, during which both people got increasingly louder and more frustrated and usually ending with a bang when his mother inevitably hung up in the middle of Louis’ finely tuned and expertly crafted rant on the benefits and drawbacks of dating a well-hung man. This time went exactly to plan, and although the phone call ended up going over the usual time limit for this sort of thing, Louis finished off the rest of his evening with a well-earned pizza delivery and a couple hours of reality TV, passing out in his chair with the TV still running.

The last time he slept in past his alarm, Louis frantically ran out his door only to trip over the full plate of cookies on the floor and faceplant into the hallway, getting cookie bits and chocolate smears all over his only pair of work pants and carpet-burning his nose as well as the little space above his lip that he could never remember the actual name for. Picking himself off the dirty hallway carpet with a stream of profanity and nonsensical expressions of anger flowing out of his mouth, Louis noticed a little note-card tucked under the lip of the pale pink plate of what used to be cookies. He grabbed the little card, shoved it into his pocket, ran down the hallway in a last ditch effort to catch his bus and make it to work before his boss noticed that he was missing, and promptly forgot about the little note sitting in the pocket of his work sweater. The carpet-burn and chocolate-stained pants served as less-than-pleasant reminders of his interesting morning and as surprised as he was at finding no cookie mess left in the hallway outside his door when he got home that evening, his brief moment of joy was instantly crushed under the weight of his anger as his nose began to itch once again.

Louis tried to fill in an online dating form for the last time one week after the Cookie Incident, and as much as he detested the idea of letting someone else into his self-assessed garbage fire of a life, the reality of his situation had started to sink in once again and he found herself in need of someone other than his stupid, grumpy, and ugly cat named Simon to talk to. Opening up the website, he tried to fill in a few bits of the form.

 

_**Name** : Louis Tomlinson _

_**Age** : 26 _

_**Occupation** : Trying not to die alone from my own sheer stupidity but also sometimes I work in a shitty maternity store full of shitty maternity stuff for shitty pregnant people who shouldn’t have been pregnant in the first place. Date me please??!? _

 

Louis swore, closed his laptop with a huff, and threw it across his bed, narrowly missing the bad-tempered ball of fluff he liked to call a cat and instead landing directly in the remnants of his microwaved spaghetti-in-a-can dinner, smashing the plate and spraying crumbs and sauce all over his sheets, clothes, Simon and the laptop itself. Swearing loudly enough to terrify Simon and send the cat running across the room, spreading tomato sauce pawprints everywhere, Louis jumped off his bed and managed to scoop up enough of the sticky, cold sauce to potentially save his laptop before gathering everything in reach and heading to the cheap laundromat down the block, or as an ex-boyfriend of his had once put it: the creepy laundromat of death which also happened to be cheap and down the block. It wasn’t until he was sitting on top of the washing machine and eating a particularly crappy vending machine bag of cookies that he remembered the note, forgotten in his sweater pocket and immediately, almost as if it could hear his thoughts, the washing machine started the rinse cycle.

The last time Louis decided to carry his laundry up five flights of stairs instead of using the scary-looking elevator was also the first time he met his new neighbour. As he dragged herself out into the hallway with damp patches under his arms and a face the colour of the sauce he had spilled, he saw a tall, lanky and incredibly uncoordinated stranger with a messy man-bun and a pink and frilly apron hang something off of his door handle, then spin on his heel, almost fall over, and go into the apartment next to his, ignoring or not seeing Louis at the end of the hall. When he reached the door, Louis could see that the package contained an almost identical plate of cookies and a large pink note, folded into a triangle and taped to the top of the plastic wrap around the cookies.

_To my neighbour-_

_These are chocolate and peanut butter cookies, to make up for the last time. I hope you’re okay (the swearing was quite loud- I hope you’re not hurt?) and I have more if you want them, just knock!_

_Sincerely,_

_A concerned neighbour who also knows it’s probably none of his business but just had a lot of leftover cookies._

_PS- If I misread the whole thing and you stomped the old cookies out of anger then please return these, no hard feelings. They’re my favourite kind and I’m also really partial to these plates! Thanks!_

 

\--

 

The first time Harry got bullied, it was the second day of kindergarten and Marcus Daniels had run up to him in the playground, pushed him to the ground and said his favourite pink and purple smiley-face T-shirt made him look like a girl. Harry had run home crying after school, thrown his favourite shirt in the garbage and hid under his bed, only to emerge when sought out by his mum twenty minutes later. Marcus Daniels became a constant problem for him after that, and although he always listened and absorbed the information when his mum talked to him about self-expression and defending himself, he started to tone down his love of bright colours and finally got his first big boy haircut when he turned seven. It wasn’t until he was nine and Marcus Daniels’ father got sent to prison for beating his girlfriend half to death and Marcus and his four younger siblings were all sent to live with his Auntie in a farmhouse three hours out of town that Harry realized that maybe people do things for a reason, and started to grow his hair out again.

From that point on, Harry loved everyone and everything with a passion and made a point to approach everything from a positive angle. He knew how incredibly destroying it could be for someone to have their whole world feel like it’s crushing them, and he tried his hardest to make sure no one else ever had to feel the way he used to. Spreading joy and helping people see the good side of things, the fresh beginnings and new starts, became his world, and that’s when Harry started counting his life in firsts.

The first time Harry tried stress-baking was the day after a friend of his sister was found dead. She wasn’t a close friend and really could’ve been categorized as more of an acquaintance but Gemma was devastated anyways and didn’t come out of her room all day. Harry, while having never even met the girl himself, still took the news to heart and found himself pacing the living room, twitching with the need to do something. His mum, who had always been incredibly perceptive and all-knowing, invite-forced him to help her bake some cookies, and he was hooked. The way he had to focus on the process and the amounts of energy he could expel through sifting ingredients together and just doing something constructive was the most healing thing he had ever experienced, and in that moment, baking seemed like the only little ray of sunshine in an otherwise dark period of time.

Eventually, the world righted itself and Harry and his family began to pull themselves together and heal. He never stopped baking though, and throughout the next couple of years until he left for college their kitchen was never lacking some form of baked treats. One month after the girl was discovered, on Harry’s eleventh birthday, Gemma brought out a large misshapen package from the back of her closet and handed it to him with a barely controlled giggle. She couldn’t contain herself, laughing as he opened it, revealing a large and excessively frilly pink and white lacy apron complete with an embroidered cat on the pocket, that looked like it had been plucked right out of a poor old lady’s kitchen. It was tacky, frilly, and loud but to Harry, it was the absolute best thing he had ever seen. He took it upon himself to wear it for the rest of the day, and Gemma genuinely smiled and laughed for the first time since the funeral.

The first night Harry spent in his new and deliciously tiny apartment was also the first time he heard the music. He had unpacked all of his belongings and just started to christen his new oven with a beautiful batch of his mum’s molten center chocolate chip cookies when something that sounded a lot like death metal started blasting from his neighbour’s apartment, startling him so much that he dropped the baking tray corner-down onto his foot and had to grip the counter for a few seconds so he didn’t fall over. Throughout the evening, the music and the accompanying yelling and swearing only got louder, until it finally transitioned into the gentle sound of a blasting T.V. by midnight. The next morning as he was about to leave for work, Harry could still hear the T.V. going, and it gave him an idea, quickly writing out a note on the pink pad of paper his mum had bought him as a joke and slipping it and a plate of cookies in front of his neighbour’s door. If Harry was a little hurt when he came home to broken plate and a pile of cookie bits smushed into the carpet, no-one really needed to know.

_Hello Neighbour!_

_My name’s Harry and I just moved in next door! I couldn’t help but hear all the noise last night, and I was just hoping everything’s okay? Feel free to come by for a chat if you ever feel like it!_

_PS- The cookies are chocolate chip- I hope that’s okay?_

 

The first time Harry saw the boy who lived next door, he tripped over his own feet and ended up falling face-first through his own doorway. He had been enjoying his day off, baking up a storm and singing along to the radio when he heard a loud crash, followed by a string of incredibly inventive swearing, some stomping, and a door slam that felt like it shook the whole building. Undeterred by the failure of his first attempt and fueled by an inexhaustible sense of optimism, Harry grabbed his favourite pink apron and started in on some more cookies.

\--

The first time Louis met Harry, he thought he looked like the love child of Jesus, an old lady, and a baby deer, and the last time Louis and Harry slept alone, they both spent their nights awake, worrying and excited for the very same reason.


End file.
